Tag: Tower Hamlets

A walk to Wapping

Today was a beautiful day. It was a day to go for a walk.

I went to the river. Near Old Billingsgate I looked under London Bridge and saw Tower Bridge and HMS Belfast. This is a 15 minute sketch, watercolour-only, no pen.

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Onwards towards the East, I stood on Sugar Quay, which has only just re-opened after years of being closed while the nearby hotel is built.

Here is the Shard, in context,  from a wooden bench on Sugar Quay.

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This map shows my walk:

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Tourists congregate around Tower Bridge. East of Tower Bridge, after St Katherines Dock, there are no tourists at all. It was suddenly very quiet. I went down “Alderman Steps”. There was this great view. The wind was fierce, and my eyes were streaming. I had a go anyway. Two mallards bobbed around amongst the floating quays, chatting away, looking around as if searching for something lost.

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Then I went on East. I had lunch in a hipster café called “Urban Baristas” on Wapping High Street.

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Lunch at the hipster café “Urban Baristas”

A man at the next table discussed flats on his mobile phone. He said Shoreditch was too expensive, so he was looking in Wapping. He’d found a good place, a view of the river, open plan, lots of space. Maybe it was offices he was describing, not flats.

Then I went on East. The river opens out here, it starts to feel more like an estuary. There are 1980s flats, brick-built, but in the river shores are the remains of the old trade: the old chains, the stanchions, huge shafts of timber, rotting piers.

Then the river bends again, and there’s a magnificent view of Canary Wharf.

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I drew this in about an hour, sitting in sunlight spiked with the smell of someone else’s fish and chips.

Here is work in progress:

Here is me drawing:

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Trinity Buoy Wharf

The headlines in the Evening Standard had described the pollution levels in central London at “Red Alert” levels. So I headed East to the clearer air and big skies of the maritime Thames.

Trinity Buoy Wharf is here:

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I drew a picture of the lighthouse.

Trinity Buoy Wharf

Above me, four stories of shipping containers contain offices. Words floated down.

“That was his first investment. He hasn’t really been improving. … To be fair, he does wear a luminescent hat. If that isn’t a warning sticker I don’t know what is.”

I continued drawing. The shed on the left of the lighthouse contains a small display called “The Faraday Effect”. Inside the shed I learned that

“there used to be two lighthouses here. The original one was built in 1854 and demolished in the late 1920s. This was the building used by Micheal Faraday in his scientific work for Trinity House.  The roof space adjoining the surviving lighthouse, which was built in 1864, housed Faraday’s workshop for examining lenses and other apparatus”

I was glad I’d drawn the roof adjoining the lighthouse. The building below it, on the right of the picture, is “Fat Boys Diner” with a Pepsi sign on top. I’ve not been in there yet.

The Faraday Effect is the phenomenon whereby when polarised light passes through a magnetic field, the polarisation rotates. Faraday also showed that light is affected by magnet force. He discovered electromagnetic induction: that electricity can be made by rotating a coil of wire in a magnetic field. Hence power stations, and much else.

Before I drew the lighthouse, I had a coffee in the marvellous “Bow Creek Café”. From there I drew this picture:

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There was a lot of light. The things in the foreground were dark, and the boat shone.

The light-bulb shaped object on the left is a construction on top of a number of blue containers labelled “ENO” in the English National Opera logo.

On the left is the lightship, which is red, called “Lightship95 Audio Recording Studio”.